Politicians feed prejudice for own ends

Australia enters dangerous terrain when debate about national identity and inclusiveness gets mixed up in raw politics. Yet, unfortunately, that is what happened during the week when the broader issue of multiculturalism became entangled with the emotional question of the government’s decision to pay the fares of grieving Christmas Island detainees to the funerals of their relatives in Sydney.

Let’s dispose first of
Scott Morrison
, the opposition spokesman on immigration, who has been engaging in a borderline “dog whistle" campaign to demonise asylum seekers by conflating the matter of unauthorised boat arrivals with community unease about immigration levels generally, Muslim arrivals in particular.

You won’t find direct quotes from Morrison that make this linkage, but the mindless “stop the boats" slogan spawned by Coalition focus-group polling was designed to serve the dual, and discreditable, purpose of feeding community prejudice for electoral advantage.

The slogan was aimed particularly at Labor’s heartland in the western suburbs of Sydney, where Coalition research showed that existing residents felt increasingly alienated by an immigrant influx that was changing the face of these communities and clogging the inadequate local infrastructure even further.

The long-suffering residents of Sydney’s west certainly have cause for complaint about poor state Labor government planning that has failed to cope with a population bulge driven partly by reckless immigration intake policies. But this has precious little to do with unauthorised boat arrivals.

Julia Gillard
’s response to this dagger at Labor’s heart was to use one of her inaugural speeches as Prime Minister to bury both Kevin Rudd’s embrace of a bigger Australia and announce tougher border control measures, as well as her ill-fated East Timor “solution".

“I reject the idea that Australia should hurtle down the track towards a big population," Gillard said, before hurtling off to Darwin to be photographed on a naval patrol peering out to sea through binoculars to convey the impression of vigilance in defence of her homeland.

The exercise was as transparent as it was silly and was designed to counter the opposition’s “stop the boats" mantra gaining resonance in the western suburbs.

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Nine months later the debate has come half-circle, thanks to Morrison’s mean-spirited criticism of Immigration Minister
Chris Bowen
’s decision to pay the fares of the bereft relatives from Christmas Island, and to a Sydney Morning Herald report that Morrison had advised senior colleagues of the desirability of exploiting community concerns about “Muslims in Australia".

I have no idea whether Morrison has been verballed by one of his colleagues, but the record shows the Coalition’s immigration spokesman has performed the role of attack dog on the border protection issue in a way that seeks to conflate legitimate issues of border security and immigration.

None of this is an argument, by the way, for lax security. Australia must do all it can to protect its vast coastline.

Hardly less cynical has been Labor’s late blooming rediscovery of the virtues of multiculturalism, after having taken a half-step during the election away from the verities of a multicultural Australia with Gillard’s embrace of “rednecks" in marginal seats who have “concerns about unauthorised arrivals".of “rednecks" in marginal seats who have “concerns about unauthorised arrivals".

Now, Labor has veered back towards its traditional posture of amplifying its support for multiculturalism after discovering that its equivocation on the issue cost it support in the very western suburbs heartland that its “no to a big Australia policy" was meant to protect. Immigrant communities in those areas were confused and upset and reacted accordingly at the polling booths.

We can do much better than this in the debate about Australia’s population – including immigration intake numbers – in which some facts might be helpful. If you listen to the Scott Morrisons of this world, you might think we are being engulfed by Muslims.

This is not true. According to the 2006 census, there were 340,393 Muslims in Australia, or about 1.5 per cent of the population. Of those, nearly 38 per cent were born here. Of the Muslims who came from abroad, Lebanese constituted the biggest number, followed by the Turks, Afghanis and Pakistanis.

All this hardly suggests we are being overwhelmed and provides a clear distinction between Australia’s situation and that of Europe, where the issue of multiculturalism is the topic du jour thanks to interventions by Angela Merkel(multikulti has “utterly failed’’), Nicolas Sarkozy(“yes it is a failure’’) and David Cameron (“we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years".)

Each of these leaders is dealing with an entirely different situation from that in Australia, where the number of “difficult-to-assimilate" new arrivals is minuscule by comparison.

Colin Rubenstein, a former member of the federal government Council for a Multicultural Australia, made a useful contribution to the debate during the week when he wrote that Australia’s brand of multiculturalism, with its emphasis on integration into the “core values and institutions of Australian life", distinguished it from its European counterparts.

Finally, maybe it’s time to retire the word “multicultural", which means, according to the Oxford, “relating to or constituting several cultural or ethnic groups within a society". This is an accurate rendition of what Bowen was talking about on Thursday, but unfortunately the word has been demonised so much by the Right that it has become a pejorative. The word “inclusive" might be a better bet.